And I think most traditional philosophers are "shitty" inasmuch as they accept traditional philosophy. The point is that I can apply the same types arguments about "horrible politics" to dialectics that were leveled at "analytic" philosophy, so making those criticisms really doesn't show us much beyond the fact that a lot of people have bad politics.
Thanks, but I have read Spinoza's Ethics, I have a copy sitting on my bookshelf. Unfortunately, it's exactly the sort of a priori nonsense that anti-dialectics opposes.
I'm not sure what you mean when you say he "invented the scientific method as it is applied to philosophy." Spinoza's method was arch-rationalist. He was operating in an early Enlightenment context where the paradigm of "certain knowledge" was mathematics, this question of "certain knowledge" being one of the prime concerns after Descartes. So he wanted to apply an analogous "geometrical method" to that employed in Euclid's Elements, making his philosophy appear more rigorous than competitors' (such as Descartes, Gassendi, etc.) according to certain standards of the day. That is, he made his work aesthetically and grammatically resemble early modern mathematics. But there is hardly anything scientific about positing axioms and "deriving" their "consequences" through purely conceptual arguments, particularly when these axioms and related claims make substantive claims about how the world is.*
Inasmuch as there is an inventor of "scientific" methods as applied to philosophy, Hume would be a much better example out of the classic philosophers, as one of his most common forms of argument was to show that we routinely believed things that simply could not be justified by the standards of post-Cartesian (including Spinoza's) philosophy, and that the arguments of such philosophy fall apart under scrutiny anyway. He would then explain our beliefs and practices by turning instead to supposed biological, historical, or psychological facts about humans. Even then, I don't really agree with Hume (another traditional philosopher, in the end), but he's significantly better as an example of philosophers being "scientific" than Spinoza.
As for "determinism" and "materialism," I have no patience for either inasmuch as they are metaphysical theses. With "materialism" I may have to qualify this as I do not accept materialism as an ontological thesis about the "fundamental nature of reality," because I think trying to posit any such theory is already barking up the wrong tree. I'm still absolutely a historical materialist, which is a historiography and method of social analysis.
It's also worse-reasoned than most dialectical works, which is saying something!
Anyway, you may be interested in this if you want an outline of the general contours of the Wittgensteinian position I'm supporting. It's short and free.
*As opposed to the more complicated case of purely formal sciences like mathematics, which Spinoza was trying to resemble. You can get an outline of roughly my understanding of formal sciences here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wi...n-mathematics/